[laughter] for obama, the 1960s ran until the early 1980s until success of ronald reagan became clear. as a young man, obama suffered a kind of '60s envy. he missed out on the civil rights movement, and on the new left. but he determined to experience them vicariously. and so he tried drugs, as he confesses in his autobiography. he rallied against south africa, he gave political speeches, he community organized, he tried to get in touch with the black experience, and in general, he searched for meaning to use a formulation that he would not reject. in other words, he very much shared the '60s mood that everyone must find his own meaning in life. and find his own way in life. because there's no meaning out there, there's no objective source of meaning that one can point to or rely on. he shared the right to make history rather than to let it happen or trust it to redeem in justice in the own good time. and as well obama, i think, shared the post modernist suspicious that universal values, as he sometimes calls them, are not universal, and probably not true in any objective sense. one c